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Sunday, April 14, 2013

I'm so excited for this stuff. That definitely wouldn't have been the case a few years ago but here I am, genuinely hype over everything I'm hearing. At Coachella last night, they let go another preview (up top) of the song "Get Lucky" featuring Pharrell, presumably the new album's first single. The shit sounds amazing.

"After three records, there was a sense of searching for a record we hadn’t done," Thomas says. The duo were dissatisfied with early demos that leaned heavily on electronic equipment, feeling like they were operating on "autopilot," Thomas says. Eventually, a new approach emerged: "We wanted to do what we used to do with machines and samplers," he explains, "but with people." Except for a snippet of "an Australian rock record" that opens the final track, "Contact," Daft Punk foreswore samples entirely, and they limited the role of drum machines to just two of the album’s thirteen tracks. The only electronics come in the form of a massive, custom-built modular synthesizer that Daft Punk played live on the album, they told me, and an arsenal of vintage vocoders on which they manually manipulated factors like pitch, vibrato and legato. "There’s this thing today where the recorded human voice is processed to try to feel robotic," Thomas says, referring to the undying AutoTune vogue. "Here, we were trying to make robotic voices sound the most human they’ve ever sounded, in terms of expressivity and emotion."